Yesterday a lot of us on the left were pleasantly surprised that a federal judge in Washington had ruled the NSA surveillance program not just merely unconstitional, but really quite sincerely unconstitutional. I know I was pleasantly surprised, though when I read the judge's name, something tugged at my not so mystic chords of memory. The good folks at Consortium News brought it all back:
U.S. District Judge Richard Leon is winning kudos across the political spectrum for a ruling that rejects the constitutionality of the National Security Agency vacuuming up the metadata on virtually every phone call made in America. Leon clearly possesses a libertarian streak, but he earned his place on the bench by running a partisan cover-up of a historic crime.
Leon was appointed to his lifetime judicial post by George W. Bush in 2002 after Leon won the gratitude of the Bush Family by protecting its interests as an aggressive and reliable Republican legal apparatchik on Capitol Hill. There, the heavy-set Leon gained a reputation as a partisan bully who made sure politically charged investigations reached a desired outcome, whatever the facts.
In the 1990s, Leon served as special counsel to the House Banking Committee as it transformed President Bill Clinton’s minor Whitewater real estate deal into a major scandal that eventually led to the House vote to impeach Clinton in 1998 and thus set the stage for Bush’s disputed election victory in 2000.
But Leon’s most important work for the Bushes may have come in the 1980s and early 1990s when he helped construct legal justifications for Republican law-breaking and sought to intimidate Iran-Contra-related witnesses who came forward to expose GOP wrongdoing.
via Consortium News
Read the whole article. This paragraph, which sums things up, is particularly interesting:
So, one could say that Richard Leon was there at the birth of what became George W. Bush’s imperial presidency, which gave birth to the NSA’s massive spying operation which Leon declared unconstitutional on Monday (although Leon stayed his ruling to give the government time to appeal).
It is impossible to believe that Leon would not, prior to his appointment, have avidly and wholeheartedly defended the NSA program were it being run under a Republican president. We must, therefore, conclude that one of two things is happening here.
One, which Robert Parry of Consortium News mentions, is the possibility that Leon, safely ensconced on the bench with a lifetime appointment, is now exercising “intellectual independence”. In other words, he would rule as he had even were George Bush still president. To give Parry his due, he mentions this possibility, but he doesn't endorse it.
The other possibility is that Leon ruled as he did because he is a partisan Obama hater. Nothing seems more likely. Were I a believer, at this point I'd say something about God working in mysterious ways. In any event, while this reflexive Obama hating on the part of Republicans has done this country a world of hurt, every once in a while it works to our collective advantage. When Obama wanted to destroy Social Security, the Republicans would have none of it; not because they didn't want the same thing, but that they simply could not bring themselves to agree with him. We may find that Obama hatred may get us a few votes on the Supreme Court to uphold good Judge Leon's decision. You never know.
I would like to believe that in this instance Obama has been playing the Republicans, manipulating them into demanding the end of a program he doesn't like, but could not get rid of unless it appeared that he was being forced to do so against his will. I'd like to believe that, but I don't.
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